Terminology representation guidelines for biomedical ontologies in the semantic web notations. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Terminologies and ontologies are increasingly prevalent in healthcare and biomedicine. However they suffer from inconsistent renderings, distribution formats, and syntax that make applications through common terminologies services challenging. To address the problem, one could posit a shared representation syntax, associated schema, and tags. We identified a set of commonly-used elements in biomedical ontologies and terminologies based on our experience with the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Specification as well as the Lexical Grid (LexGrid) project. We propose guidelines for precisely such a shared terminology model, and recommend tags assembled from SKOS, OWL, Dublin Core, RDF Schema, and DCMI meta-terms. We divide these guidelines into lexical information (e.g. synonyms, and definitions) and semantic information (e.g. hierarchies). The latter we distinguish for use by informal terminologies vs. formal ontologies. We then evaluate the guidelines with a spectrum of widely used terminologies and ontologies to examine how the lexical guidelines are implemented, and whether our proposed guidelines would enhance interoperability.

publication date

  • September 28, 2012

Research

keywords

  • Internet
  • Semantics
  • Vocabulary, Controlled

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC3563768

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 84873129066

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1016/j.jbi.2012.09.003

PubMed ID

  • 23026232

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 46

issue

  • 1